When you first meet Simon Hong, and he explains that he makes robotic chairs, you may have a number of reactions. You mean wheelchairs? Dinner table chairs that can eject ill-mannered guests?
“I started laughing,” says Paul Sullivan, describing his first encounter with the chair at the Cambridge Science Festival in 2015. “I thought it was maybe a fraternity thing — a remote-controlled chair to go get your beer.”
But Sullivan, it turns out, was the perfect first customer for the robotic chair: the Milford resident had undergone surgery for a herniated disc, and sitting at his desk for long periods could have extreme consequences. Hong’s chair, originally conceived in 2011 to help him address his own back pain, nudges the occupant to shift position every minute or two. For many early testers of the chair, known as StandX, that regular reminder to cycle through different positions makes long stretches in front of a computer tolerable.